Half-Year Report of Solana DePIN Project: Related Projects’ Market Value Surpasses 10 Billion, Helium Mobile Attracts Nearly 90,000 Users.

AI and data-intensive industries have become the backbone of real-world infrastructure, and DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) is reshaping the blockchain field through its innovative use of existing infrastructure and data-centric business models.
Unlike traditional Internet of Things (IoT), DePIN focuses not only on the hardware devices themselves but also on the value extraction and circulation of data. Through its decentralized network architecture and incentive mechanisms, DePIN encourages participants to collectively maintain and contribute data, thereby maximizing the value of data.
By 2023, data from Messari and DePIN.Ninjia shows that the DePIN ecosystem includes 650 projects with a total market value of 35 billion dollars. These projects cover various fields, including 250 in the computing domain, 200 in artificial intelligence, 100 in wireless technology, 50 in sensors, 50 in energy, and 25 in the service sector. The current estimated valuation of the DePIN market is close to 2.2 trillion dollars, and it is expected to reach 3.5 trillion dollars in the next four years.
With a reliable and extensive data infrastructure, DePIN relies heavily on community participation, as the community is the cornerstone of this decentralized hardware network. Many projects, including io.net, are mainly focused on Solana, leveraging Solana’s advantages in liquidity, speed, scalability, and cost to achieve value transfer and unleash potential economic value.
Being the primary choice for deploying DePIN projects, Solana’s FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation) for the Solana DePIN project exceeds 10 billion dollars, with a market capitalization of over 4 billion dollars.
Recently, Flipside released the Solana DePIN Semi-Annual Report, and this article by PANews highlights four major DePIN projects in Solana: Render Network, Helium, Hivemapper, and ShdwDrive, analyzing on-chain data and the latest developments of these projects.
Render Network (RNDR)
Render Network provides GPU rendering services through decentralized computing, meeting the needs of creators for large-scale GPU computation in the rendering process. The project offers a distributed GPU rendering platform, allowing nodes to provide idle GPUs, enabling creators to use them without being limited by hardware conditions, and allowing those who own GPUs to profit from it.
Recently, Render’s Octane software was recommended by Apple, highlighting its growth trajectory. Since migrating to Solana in November 2023, Render has successfully generated 33 million still images. These images can be a part of movies, TV shows, games, or other types of visual content. If the same number of rendering tasks were done continuously using an NVIDIA RTX 3090 graphics card (currently a high-end consumer GPU), it would take 1,375 days (about 3 years and 9 months) to complete.
The number of active node operators reached a peak of 19,000 in January 2024, showing a growth of 66.3% since the migration. With the increasing demand for GPU performance, more projects similar to Render are expected to follow suit and build infrastructure on high-performance blockchains like Solana.


Helium Network
The Helium Network wireless project migrated to the Solana blockchain in April this year. The project enables decentralized wireless networks to provide connectivity services by utilizing distributed nodes instead of centralized infrastructure, successfully transforming the communication field.
Currently, Helium not only has dual products for IoT and mobile services but has also shown significant growth in the ecosystem, especially in the mobile network aspect. Helium Mobile has attracted nearly 90,000 users in less than a year and has maintained this growth above the 2023 levels. This growth is largely due to Helium Mobile’s announcement last year of launching unlimited 5G telecommunications services nationwide for only $20 per month, bringing decentralized network services to the general public.
As shown in the graph below, Helium Mobile’s DC burnout far exceeds that of the Internet of Things (IoT) network, indicating a significant increase in network usage and adoption with the launch of the 5G telecommunications service project.


In addition to user growth, Helium Mobile has also incentivized network participation through various initiatives. The issuance of Mobile Discovery rewards has significantly increased since December 2023, and more users are actively participating in network coverage and data collection tasks to earn more MOBILE tokens, surpassing the growth rate of new users. With the accelerated deployment of 5G, the Helium ecosystem is expected to maintain strong growth in the coming years.
Hivemapper
Hivemapper, a decentralized digital mapping network, creates global real-time 3D maps by drawing maps and spatial data, competing with traditional players like Google Maps. In 2022, Hivemapper launched its native cryptocurrency, HONEY, to provide rewards for users who provide driving data and road imagery through dashcams.
In less than two years, Hivemapper has mapped over 50 million kilometers of roads, and as of the latest official data, it has mapped over 200 million kilometers of roads in total. Its incentive model promotes strong community participation, as seen in the graph below, where nearly one-third of HONEY token holders are active contributors. This high level of participation is driven by Hivemapper’s incentive model, where contributors can earn HONEY by participating in mapping, quality assurance, and training Map AI activities.
With the growing demand for high-precision map data from next-generation applications like autonomous driving, decentralized solutions like Hivemapper are expected to receive more attention and investment.


ShdwDrive
Decentralized storage is a crucial pillar of the DePIN ecosystem, providing secure data hosting solutions. ShdwDrive is one of the emerging participants on Solana, aiming to provide scalable object storage for Web3 builders.
Although ShdwDrive has not yet launched its mainnet, it has shown promising results in the testnet. In a recent test, the network demonstrated the ability to process up to 38,000 transactions per second under peak conditions. The number of SHDW token holders has also steadily increased, reaching a peak of 67,000 in March 2024.


The composability of DePIN with other ecosystems positions it to transform the economic system through data integrity and scalable suite solutions. Therefore, the continuous growth of data is inevitable, and projects like ShdwDrive are expected to provide users with more secure and flexible space and drive new use cases and innovations in the entire Web3 ecosystem.
What challenges does the DePIN project need to address?
In the process of realizing the vision of all the projects mentioned, the integration of physical devices with blockchain is the first complex step. The core of the DePIN project lies in building a seamless integration of physical devices and data, which not only needs to meet technical requirements but also consider cost-effectiveness and market acceptance. Collaborating with hardware manufacturers such as sensors and monitors and installing DePIN applications on existing devices are the current practices of most project teams. However, how to ensure data security and privacy while achieving large-scale device connectivity and data interaction remains a challenging problem to be solved.
Secondly, performance bottlenecks and storage consensus are also significant challenges that the DePIN project needs to face. When millions of devices are running simultaneously on the blockchain, existing blockchain infrastructure struggles to provide sufficient performance support. While high-performance public chains like Solana offer new options for the DePIN project, they may only be suitable for minimum viable products (MVP) stages.
Furthermore, the core of decentralization is the verifiability of data, but IoT devices often involve non-deterministic data sources. Ensuring the authenticity and reliability of data requires building robust data traceability and authentication systems and using statistical and artificial intelligence techniques to simulate historical data.
The DePIN project is in a stage of development full of opportunities, but it also brings challenges in terms of data, efficiency, and centralization. For applications like geolocation services, users want to ensure their privacy while the project team aims to ensure the fairness of the system, leading to a contradiction between personal privacy and data security. Therefore, how to continue to focus on technological innovation, sustainable business models, and other aspects will determine whether the DePIN project can truly achieve the integration of the physical and digital worlds and usher in a new era of the next-generation internet.